Paul Arrested in Jerusalem

In about AD 57, at the close of his third missionary journey, Paul came up to Jerusalem with the collection he had gathered from the Gentile churches for the poor believers there. The elders welcomed him but warned that thousands of Jewish Christians in Jerusalem had heard reports that Paul was teaching the Jews of the Diaspora to forsake Moses. To allay these rumors, James suggested Paul join four men in a temple purification rite and pay their expenses. While Paul was in the Temple completing this vow, some Jews from the province of Asia recognized him, stirred up the crowd, and seized him, shouting that he had brought a Gentile (Trophimus the Ephesian) into the inner court — a capital offense. The whole city was thrown into confusion. They dragged Paul out of the Temple and tried to kill him. The Roman tribune Claudius Lysias, commanding the cohort stationed in the Antonia Fortress overlooking the Temple, ran down with soldiers and centurions; the crowd stopped beating Paul. The soldiers had to carry him up the steps because of the mob's violence, with Paul shouting in Greek and then addressing the people in Aramaic from the staircase (Acts 21:27–22:21). When his speech to the crowd ended in fresh uproar, the tribune brought him into the barracks and ordered him examined by flogging — until Paul revealed he was a Roman citizen, untouchable without trial. Brought before the Sanhedrin, Paul divided the council by appealing to his hope of the resurrection (23:6–9). When a plot of more than forty men to assassinate him was uncovered, the tribune sent Paul under heavy military escort by night to the Roman procurator Felix at Caesarea. Paul was kept in custody there for two years. Felix's successor Festus, eager to do the Jews a favor, asked whether Paul would be tried in Jerusalem; sensing a trap, Paul exercised his right as a Roman citizen and appealed to Caesar (25:11). Festus answered, "To Caesar you have appealed; to Caesar you shall go." Before being sent, Paul testified before King Herod Agrippa II and his sister Bernice, defending his life as a Pharisee, recounting his Damascus-road conversion, and pressing the king with the gospel. The arrest in Jerusalem opened the providential road that would carry Paul to Rome itself, fulfilling the Lord's word: "As you have testified to the facts about me in Jerusalem, so you must testify also in Rome" (23:11).